Presently, over 90% of power outages occur along electric distribution systems. Microgrid is an emerging and promising paradigm for enhancing distribution system resilience. A microgrid is a small-scale, localized distribution network designed to supply electrical and heatload of a local community (e.g., a military base, a high-tech park, or a university campus). It typically includes distributed generators, load, storage and protection devices that are regulated by a microgrid central controller. Thus, it is desirable to design microgrids with high penetration of renewable energy sources.
On the other hand, for such microgrids, unintentional islanding, also referred to as emergency operation, is particularly challenging. This is because renewable energy sources have much smaller inertia than traditional energy generation sources and are intermittent and uncertain. As a result, it is important to achieve fast emergency control to guarantee a smooth transition from grid connection mode to islanding mode. Otherwise, the system may lose balance between load and generation, and may eventually collapse. Fast emergency control of a microgrid relies on the communication infrastructure.
To guarantee microgrid stability, the communication infrastructure needs to provide reliable and low-latency data transmission, as well as react quickly to dynamic network conditions (e.g., link failure, network congestion). Furthermore, it needs to satisfy the diverse quality of service (QoS) requirements of different types of data being transmitted over the communication network, some being small and periodic control data with delay requirement in milliseconds, while some being large energy management data that can tolerate minutes latencies. Industrial control networks, such as field bus, do not meet the above requirements, and hence are not suitable for microgrids.
These and other needs are effectively addressed by the systems and methods of the present disclosure.